A year after…

Close to a year ago, we shared the news of our new community program; the Strapi Community Stars.

Here is a glimpse of what they have been upto over the course of the year (can’t believe it’s almost a year already).

• Some MCed or gave talks at StrapiConf

• They have been amazing at helping out other members on the Forum and Discord.

• They've built amazing plugins like this and this.

• Written great blog posts, like this and this.

• They've made contributions to our code base too (here and here + lots more) !

• They've given feedback to influence upcoming releases (here, here and here and a lot more!!)

• We've had meetups organised too!

It’s been a fascinating period of time! We’ve used that to watch and learn with the intent of recalibrating. We learned a lot from the program and used our lessons to make for a better program when we decided to grow the list of Stars.

What did we learn?

It’s been an amazing period with lots of growth on the community and product sides of Strapi.

Over the past few months, we’ve learned our fair share of lessons with regard to running a community program. Here are a summary of these lessons

• Time is an asset for everyone; It takes some time to realize but you have to be very respectful about how much time you demand from people in Community programs.
• Engagement isn’t always involved; We want to be engaged with a certain way sometimes but our persistence on a set way leaves lots of really good nuggets from looking at how different people want to be involved with your program. To each their own, different people like to contribute in their own ways
• Life happens; It’s been a tough couple of months for everyone and it’s important to remember we’re humans going through our own problems outside of what we do or what we work with. Give people time to be people.
• Swag is great but connections are better; This was a great takeaway, it builds on letting people be involved in ways they want. It’s important to let people be rewarded as they see fit. What might be amazing for me might not mean the world to someone else as it does for me, have those conversations and optimize accordingly.

The last lesson really formed the foundation of this new batch of stars. We realised that we can provide as many perks as we could but for our members, value came from connecting with similar peers in the community. So we decided to make sure that we facilitate these connections as we carry out the program.

What has changed?

We started out with creating a list of the stars, who they are, what they do, their areas of expertise and how they like to contribute to the strapi project.

This list can be found here

The point with this is to lower the barrier for communication and give people context for who does what and who they might find value from engaging with.

So far in the month we’ve had this up, we’ve seen more engagement amongst community members!

Meet our new Stars

Here are our stars!!

Precious Luke

I am a big fan of open source. I love helping people.

Ben Henning

Senior Software Developer, Researcher on new stacks, and passionate about helping others

Boaz Poolman

Full stack web/app developer from the Netherlands specialized in Drupal, Strapi & React (-native). When I'm not responding I'm probably riding my surfboard, or cruising on my skateboard.

Gabriela Zifferman

Detail-oriented front-end developer with UX / UI background. Experience in developing responsive websites. Skilled in React.JS, Javascript, CSS. Great team player in remote distributed groups.

Thibaut David

I'm 23 yo, passionate about swimming and drums. Candies are like drugs for me & I'm the CTO of Shelt.in

Saad Muhammad Mujeeb

Tech enthusiast, Jamstack lover, Altruistic towards all communities.

Monico A. Moreno

NodeJs/Javascript consultant with over 2 decades of professional experience in software development.

Ukpai Ugochi

I am a female Nigerian with a Bachelor's degree in Marine Engineering and bootcamp certificates in software development. I'm a full stack JavaScript developer on the MEVN stack. I love to share knowledge about my transition from marine engineering to software development in the form of writing, to encourage people who love software development and don't know where to begin. I also contribute to FOSS in my free time

Joris Witteman

Developer / designer of apps, sites, platforms, APIs and bots

Abdón Rodríguez Davila

Galician. Technology enthusiast. Frontend Developer and Google Dev Expert on Web Technologies.

What is next for the program

We’ll keep rolling out new stars in cohorts every 6 months - like last time we’re looking forward to learning everything we can about how best we can add value to the people in this program.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for ways in which you can contribute to the Strapi Community, most of the ways are around the items in our Community Resources…

• Content and Writing

• Events and Meetups

• Forums and Discord

I look forward to writing another one of these in the near future! I’m sure it’ll be amazing - till then <3